The dead houses—Palo Alto homes that feature communal living and are named after Grateful Dead songs—have achieved a local level of fame over the past 30 years. But what’s it like to live in one of them? Peninsula Press reporter Xandra Clark—herself a dead house resident—takes us inside.

I moved into a dead house this past summer. I’d heard about the Palo Alto co-ops through fellow students at Stanford University and over the years was invited to attend potlucks, open mic nights and dance parties at many of them. They are the off-campus, slightly older and more intimate versions of Stanford’s co-ops.

Instead of housing zombies, as their name might imply, the dead houses are home mostly to Stanford students and recent graduates. They are all creatively named after Grateful Dead song lyrics—like China Cat Sunflower, Bear’s Choice and Franklin’s Tower—because the one landlord who owns them all, Rob Levitsky, used to be a big “deadhead” back in the day, attending as many concerts as he could up and down California, often dressed as a lit-up dancing bear. Before devoting himself purely to maintaining the dead houses, he worked at a Silicon Valley tech company called Megatest, which made testing equipment for computer chips. Continue Reading >>